Oxygen
by tessaless
Summary: A series of loosely connected anecdotes revealing the relationship between Nate and the world around him.


A/N: This was supposed to be a joke, but ended up sort-of not being a joke but rather an insight into the way that I view Nate. Let this be known: I love Nate.

_"If trees could scream, would we be so cavalier about cutting them down? We might, if they screamed all the time, for no good reason." _ Jack Handey

* * *

There was a large, leafy, perfectly climbable tree growing in the middle of central park. Nate didn't know what kind of tree it was, because Nate didn't know about that kind of thing the way he could classify weed and spew off baseball statistics. He knew the leaves were kind of big and turned yellow and red at the end of the summer. Then they fell off, which made it a deciding tree or a deciduous tree—something like that.

Nate was the kind of kid who lived in a big, multi-story apartment at the top of an extremely tall and luxurious building in the middle of an extremely tall and luxurious city. He learned at an extremely young age that trees are tall, and no, Nathaniel, you cannot grow one in your room. Because he was such a tortured individual who lacked any sort of real-childhood backyard conformity, Nate's string of nannies had carted him over to central park to frolic in the bit of grass instead.

His first recollection of the tree—his tree—began somewhere after pre-school but before elementary school, marking the beginning of what would prove to be a tumultuous love affair. He was crawling along the muddy, post-rain ground looking for worms when he glanced up and saw a big, fat caterpillar crawling up the trunk of the tree. Nate waddled on over and picked the big, fat caterpillar right off the bark with his little, fat fingers and giggled as it crawled up and down his arm.

Then it peed on him. Nate screamed and shook it off his elbow, and tried to run away from the horrible monster but ended up tripping over the roots of the tree and smashing head-first into the muck below it. Which hurt. So Nate cried. His nanny paused in her flirtation with a jogger and his dog to glance over at Nate. He didn't look dead. There was no visible blood. She ignored him. Nate realized all of this and stopped crying. Sort-of. His head still hurt a lot.

In a fit of angst only a four-year-old can reason, Nate began to peel the bark off of the tree that had just made him fall. The tree deserved it then, anyways, right? He systematically removed just about everything that he could reach until his nanny (the jogger was nowhere in sight) came on over, scooped him up into her arms, looked him in the eye and said, "Nate. You cannot take apart trees. They will die." Nate figured the tree pretty much should die after it tripped him into the mud, and he told her as much. The lady laughed, but set him back on the ground.

"Trees are like life, Nate," she said. "Do you know what you breathe?" Nate smiled. He knew!

"Air! I breathe air," he said, smugly.

"Yes. But mostly, you breathe oxygen. If there wasn't any oxygen in the air, you wouldn't be able to breathe." Nate considered this. He'd never thought to worry about there not being stuff he could breathe in the air! He always just kind of figured it would be there for him, like new toys and macaroni and cheese.

"Is the oxygen almost gone?" he asked, very concerned. His nanny smiled.

"This tree makes oxygen," she explained, "And you and I and everyone else breathe oxygen. So we wouldn't want to kill off this tree that is keeping us alive, would we?" And she grabbed his hand and they walked back home. Nate ate some macaroni for lunch, and he played with his favorite new toys. The only thing was, he couldn't forget about how he almost killed everyone in the whole entire world that morning when he tried to kill that tree. That tree was making what he breathed! Nate vowed to only be nice to the tree from now until forever.

* * *

Five years later, Nate was in third grade. He could name every planet in the solar system, and his mom kept making him wear really uncomfortable clothes with ties and Blair kept making fun of him at school. So Nate took off his tie and slung it across one of the benches at the park and went to go play capture the flag with some kids he sort of kind of knew. Because Nate was naturally fast and rarely got tagged and everyone liked him because he never hit, kicked, or bit anyone, his team made him captain. They hid their flag underneath a hot-dog vendor's stand while the guy was making a sale.

The game was long. Nate liked to run, and he was good at it. He wasn't as good at finding the flag, though, which is why he was so excited when he spotted it that day, a flash of a red sweatshirt caught in-between the branches of a tree—his favorite tree—and without thinking (something Nate seemed to do often), he quickly and skillfully climbed the trunk and branches, circling up until he plucked the flag out. Nate was thrilled—and then he looked down.

The ground seemed miles away. A cold wind picked up and the branch Nate was perched on swayed with the breeze. Nate swallowed. Two kids on the other team were waiting below for him to get down so they could tag him and send him to jail. But that didn't bother Nate. Because he didn't think he would ever be able to get down. The ground seemed miles away. A lump was rising in the back of Nate's throat.

"Hey, Nate!" one kid called, "What are you doing up there, feeding the birds?"

"Yeah, get down here!"

"You're holding up the game, dude." But Nate couldn't move. Soon everyone was crowded below him. He tried to take a step, and his hand slipped on the branch, his skin scraping. The blood oozed up and he felt like his arm was on fire.

"What, are you scared to fall or something, Archibald?" Scattered laughter followed this comment. Nate refused to look at them.

"Come on Natey-poo," shouted another maliciously, "We'll catch you!" Nate fought back the hot, salty tears that threatened to spill out. He grabbed on to the braches for dear life and threw down the flag.

"Go away," he yelled. They did, twenty or thirty minutes later, after calling him every name in the solar system. (Probably some that weren't even used on any of the nine planets. Nate could name them all, in order. He got an 'A' on that quiz. For once.) Not that Nate could find a way down the tree, even with them gone. It got dark and began to rain.

Nate began to cry, but no one could tell anymore, because it was raining. Nate learned that that's the best time to cry. When no one can tell that you're doing it. Eventually, a nice homeless man helped him down. Nate gave him some money, and he seemed happy enough. Nate could never keep his moneys straight. They were all the same size, and the numbers looked kind of funny and were hard to find.

So, he gave the guy the one with the old, ugly man with round glasses and odd, partially balding hair. A hundred. Nate wasn't really sure how much money that was. He couldn't really remember the way the decimal points worked but he was relatively certain it could buy a king-size candy bar. Whatever. He got home, and no one seemed to even have noticed he was gone.

"You're quite dirty, Nate," his mother said, "Go shower." He did. At the very least, Nate thought as the hot water washed over his scrape, stinging, the tree hadn't let him down. He didn't fall out or anything. The only thing was, now Blair wasn't the only one who kept mocking him and throwing stuff at him at school. School wasn't very much fun anymore, that way.

* * *

Four years after that, and Nate can still see the bark he peeled away at the base of the tree. It doesn't look like very much anymore, and someone else carved their initials in where he'd made the space, but he guesses that bark doesn't grow back the way that skin does. It seems so significant and permanent, and Nate doesn't like to think of things that way. It means he might mess up and ruin something forever. Nate doesn't like to think about forever.

He's friends with Chuck now, who would never make fun of him for getting stuck in a tree, well, mostly because Chuck couldn't get up the tree in the first place, but also because Chuck is about as loyal as loyal gets. And Chuck doesn't make fun of him when he's scared to get high because he believes everything they learned in health. Chuck just prints him off some statistics from the internet and tells him his sources are as safe as they come but 'hey, it's your choice man.'

But Nate doesn't want to look like a pussy, even in front of Chuck, so they cut pre-Algebra and sit together under the tree in the park as Chuck hands him the hand-made, smoldering, sweet-smelling mess. So Nate inhales. And coughs. And continues to cough for quite some time. Chuck laughs, but doesn't say anything, just pats him on the back and looks up at the sky. Nate smiles and pretends that it's great, even though he doesn't feel a thing, just a stale taste in his throat and the world gets a little fuzzy. Later he has a weird dream, and even later, a few times later, it starts being fun and relaxing, and Nate doesn't have to think about anything. Which is good, because Nate's not very good at thinking, as it turns out.

Once he drops his joint on the tree and it makes a little popping noise, and there's a black mark left. Nate doesn't like to damage things so this upsets him, and this is his tree, so that upsets him more. So he doesn't smoke for a few weeks and Chuck asks what's wrong with him, man, but in a worried way. Not in a mean way. That's what Nate loves about Chuck.

* * *

Two years after that, he starts high school, and he starts dating Blair, and he starts running varsity cross country, and Nate doesn't really have time to come sit under his tree like he used to. He can't smoke weed anymore because he needs to breathe as much as possible. (Running can do that to you, sometimes.) He's got homework, and homework takes Nate forever to do anyways, even though he doesn't take honors and AP classes like Blair does.

And he passes by his tree after school every day, and it looks lonely and cold, and sometimes the wind rustles the leaves as he circles the park. One time Nate goes over by Chuck's suite to smoke and then he takes a loop around the park. He feels as if his tree is waving to him. "Come back, Nate!" it calls. "I miss you." Except then he sees another kid under his tree one day, lying on his back and talking on a cell phone.

"Hey!" he yells, before realizing that it's a public park and a public tree and that anyone can sit underneath it, if they want to. The kid looks up and over and Nate looks down and picks up his pace a little. He feels a little nauseous for the rest of the day, but maybe that has to do with the weird fish they ate for dinner.

* * *

Another year passes and three days after his sixteenth birthday, Nate loses his virginity, but not to Blair. Serena leaves quickly to go and meet Georgina. (Oh, man, did Georgina ever scare Nate.) And Nate leaves too, but instead of going home, or going to find Chuck, or talking to Blair like he knew he eventually would have to, he finds himself in Central Park, drunk off his ass and lying face-down on the ground below his tree.

"What am I going to do?" he asks, out loud, over and over until some bum trying to sleep on a bench a little ways away yells, "Shut it, asshole!" So he stands up and stumbles over to the tree, grabbing the trunk around the middle so he doesn't fall over. Nate wakes up the next morning in bed, but he doesn't remember leaving the tree.

He gets dressed, ignoring the throbbing pain in his head, and walks over back to the park. A crumpled underage drinking ticket with his name on it sits at the bottom of the trunk, half buried in dirt, and Nate is glad he came back. He can't remember talking to the cops, which he figures is just as well anyways, because who would want to remember something like that. He climbs the tree, halfway up, and sits on the biggest branch, leaning his head against the trunk.

* * *

Seven months later, he's sitting the exact same way (although he did come down for a bit in-between) and his cell phone rings. It's Chuck.

"Where are you?" he demands angrily, "I thought you were coming over to help me prepare for the lost weekend!" Oh, yeah. Nate always wanted to do the lost weekend, but now that he's actually a junior and it actually is lost weekend time, the lost weekend seems kind of lame and contrived.

"I'm in a tree," he tells Chuck, "you know, the one I like in Central Park." Chuck sighs exasperatedly.

"I do know, Nathaniel," he says. Chuck has the annoying habit of always calling him Nathaniel. "You spend a lot of time in that tree."

"Well, it's nice." Chuck laughs.

"I'll tell you what you should be doing instead of spending so much time in that tree. You should be spending some time in your girlfriend instead, Nate. Have you still not done the deed?" Nate shoots up, way too fast, and nearly falls off of the branch he's resting on.

"That's Blair you're talking about, Chuck," he says.

"I know," Chuck replies, drawing out the words. "Do you, though? Because I know if I had that piece of ass…" Nate doesn't really like it when Chuck talks about how he would love to be on Blair, although he's not really sure why. He knows that Chuck and Blair are just friends. Plus, Chuck would never try to take Blair away from him. But still.

"Okay, I'm getting out of the tree," he says. And then he hangs up. And he does get out of the tree and walk over to Chuck's suite. Because Nate and Chuck are best friends, and that's what best friends do.

* * *

But even after that, Chuck does take Blair from him and in every sense of the word, so he doesn't talk to Chuck anymore after that, and he doesn't have Blair, and he isn't really friends with Serena anymore. So then Nate spends a lot of time in and under his tree, smoking and thinking and sometimes avoiding visiting his dad in rehab. He studies for the SAT and he still takes a long time to do his homework, but sitting in the park makes him feel somehow calmer, and he's not so alone.

Even later still, he sees an ambulance drive through the grass to his tree, and he watches them load a little girl onto it—she cries and cries and cries. Nate also cries. They circle his tree with bright yellow caution tape, and Nate isn't allowed to get any closer. He reads in the paper about how the girl fell out of the tree, and broke her neck. There's a picture next to the article—she's in a wheelchair now—and they're cutting down the tree.

So Nate cuts class to watch them cut the tree and he sits on the park bench and tries not to cry. The machines are enormous and thundering and they smell like chemicals and poison gas, and it only takes a second. As the sawdust clears, Nate averts his eyes as if he expects to see blood or something pouring out of the tree—his tree. He almost does expect to see some kind of life force, but the tree just lies there on the ground, fallen and weak.

The weird thing is, they don't take the tree with them when they go, and the construction people drive their machinery away and the police remove the barricades, but the tree still sits. The leaves all fall off or blow away and Nate comes to look at it every single day, waiting for it to disappear. He breaks off a small, leaf-less branch and puts it on his dresser. (One of the maids later throws it away.) And Nate calls Vanessa, because Vanessa seems like she could handle the tree story, which she can. But Vanessa asks him why he didn't stop them from cutting down the tree.

"I don't really know," he says, and means it. He can practically see her smile through the phone.

"Nate," she says, firmly, "You have all of this money with which you could have bought the rights to the tree, or had the tree transplanted, or dug the tree out yourself and planted it in your kitchen or something." Nate doesn't really get it.

"It's the city, though," he protests, "They just do whatever they want." Vanessa sighs.

"Well," she says, "I don't know if it would have worked or not. All that I'm saying is, if you love something that much, you should have fought to keep it, Nate." Nate isn't really sure whether or not he believes Vanessa's theory, but he knows that he feels a little empty inside whenever he walks past Central Park lately.

"I guess," he says, if only just to fill the silence. Vanessa hangs up, and Nate decides that he might as well fight for the things he loves because, well, what else is there to fight for, anyways.

So, two weeks later he lets Chuck apologize. A week after that, he takes Serena for coffee. He never did set things right with Blair, but Nate knows there's still time. He doesn't like to think about forever, anyways.

Then, Nate buys a pack of seeds from the grocery store two blocks from the park. He doesn't know what kind of tree they are, but the picture on the bag looks close enough. And all Nate needs is close enough. He goes over to the hole where his tree used 

to be and he kneels on the ground next to it, opens up the packet of seeds and pours them all into the soft, moist dirt. At least one of them has to grow, right?

Nate figures that it's the least he can do, after he tried to kill the other one.

* * *

_"The tree is more than first a seed, then a stem, then a living trunk, and then dead timber. The tree is a slow, enduring force straining to win the sky."_ Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

A/N: So, major disclaimer with this one here. Not only do I not own Gossip Girl and the characters that reside within, but I also did not come up with the idea of shipping Nate/tree. The original sentiment was created by thesharpestlives x and can be found in its entirety in her profile.

Please review! Also, I'm going to take five seconds to ask for constructive criticism. I'd love to know if you like my story, but even more, I'd love to know what's missing, or what doesn't connect, or what's difficult to understand. I want to improve as a writer, and reviews help me do just that. Thanks so much for taking the time to help!

_"A tree never hits an automobile except in self defense."_ American Proverb


End file.
